The Future of SEO is Not SEOview commentsSearch engine optimization, as all traditional definitions describe it, is going to become obsolete. And the change has already begun.The Internet has always been a landgrab. It started with domain...

Apple News & Analysis

We all know streaming music is a big thing — people no longer get excited about building playlists or hitting shuffle on their iPods only to hear the same tired tunes over and over again.

Today we want to listen to crowd-sourced, curated music that’s selected specifically for us. And services that can provide that need to process and crunch lots of data (demographic, psychographic, mobile, social …), big data and to then apply predictive analytics to determine what might delight us.

While providers like Spotify and Pandora have been doing that for quite some time, Beats Music recently came out of nowhere and disrupted the scene — so much so that Apple bought it (and Beats Electronics) from Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre.

Now we’re not going to tell you that either of those music moguls knows a lot about big data (they could, but we sort of doubt it). But we do know this: Beats Music uses MapR for its big data needs.

IBM’s acquisition of Silverpop will create “headaches” for marketers using Big Blue platforms because of “silo problems” that will lead to a potentially expensive “integration nightmare,” according to a top official at Adobe, a leading competitor.

Suresh Vittal, vice president of marketing strategy for Adobe’s Digital Marketing business, told CMSWire that IBM, which typically sells to CIOs, is trying to hand marketing to IT.

“This acquisition feels like an attempt to fix the failings in the Unica acquisition: namely email and cross-channel execution,” Vittal said. “We think Silverpop is a partial answer that creates significant overlap problems for both Unica and Silverpop clients.”

Only two weeks after Office landed on iPad and about eight weeks since it made it easy to find through the launch of Office.com, Microsoft is chasing users wherever it can find them -- and in this case it's Chrome Web Store, right in the middle of Google’s own stomping ground.

It also appears to have quietly retired its Scroogled campaign.

It would probably be a bit silly to overestimate the real impact of this, given that users were always able to access Office apps through the Office.com in the Chrome browser. But with a new CEO on board, any sign of changes in the way Microsoft is doing business should be paid attention to.

It's unlikely these claims will go unchallenged, particularly in the file sharing and sync space where companies like Dropbox and Box claim to offer easier file sharing and collaboration possibilities than SharePoint does.

Let's cut to the chase. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s first press conference since he started 52 days ago was pretty underwhelming.

Yes, he finally announced the launch of Office for iPad, along with the new Enterprise Mobility Suite — surprising just about no one.

But all of those who expected something more from Nadella, like detailed insight about his plans for the company, left disappointed. Aside from discussing his Mobile First, Cloud First strategy and those plans to push all Microsoft customers into the cloud, he didn't say much.

But give him points for being poetic, in person and online. As he noted in a blog post, "As long as human curiosity and ambition drive us to create new things, capture moments and collaborate to get things done, we should expect the world of devices to follow suit."

If Microsoft press conferences are always a matter of intense speculation and conjecture, the conference that has been announced for next Thursday (March 27th) in San Francisco will be, by anyone’s standards, an exceptional event -- not least because it will be the first conference hosted by new CEO Satya Nadella.

Of course, excitement is also being driven by speculation that, finally, Microsoft will be announcing Microsoft Office for iPad.

Wall Street must be pretty muted today. It has been a bad week with a lot of big companies calling out some pretty miserable results. IT companies are no exception, but we’re not going to talk about Twitter here. Instead, we’ll simply say Sony’s figures were so bad, that it has decided to pull out of the personal computer market.

It has also decided to pull out of the television manufacturing space, but we don’t really care about that. But PC’s are different though and the announcement by Sony comes just a day before Gartner published figures to show that the European PC market is down another 4 percent.

There are no recent figures for the US market yet, but they should land soon. While analysts will be looking desperately to find a silver lining, it’s a good bet that those figures are going to be pretty poor, too.

All that stuff about the death of the PC ... Maybe it really isn't exaggerated.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak captivated a tech-savvy audience in San Francisco today by warning that society is moving towards "a police state," calling for public resistance to the unrestricted collection of marketing data, and speculating that Apple could produce iPhones that run on Google's "not-so-fenced-in" Android operating system.

From repeated assurances that "your call is very important to us" to an anonymized stream of corporate communications … Isn't there anything that can put some humanity back into collaboration and communications? The quantified self – breaking down human behavior into data sets – could help companies inject some personality into their customer service.

Ahead of today's Apple earnings announcement — whatever the sales for last year's models — all the gossip is about company's "plans" for larger iPhone and iPad devices, as its enterprise and worker battle with Android and Windows Phones heats up. Are competitors poised to take a bite from Apple?

Or will Apple's expected larger-screens satisfy an insatiable mobile marker — and even help improve productivity? What more can Apple do to drive its presence in the enterprise as Intel's Android Device Protection Technology drive starts up, with CIOs becoming increasingly concerned about mobile security? And, with Microsoft's wide-ranging enterprise play, can the revamping of iWorks help it become an enterprise winner?

Brace yourself for the next evolution of digital marketing — indoor location and place-based marketing, a fast-growing segment that could be worth more than $10 billion annually in the US by 2018.

Indoor location technologies bring Internet-style tracking to physical spaces. And their development is changing the way retailers, venue owners, manufacturers and brands think about operations, place-based marketing and the customer experience, according to a new report from San Francisco-based Opus Research, an IT industry analyst firm.

Microsoft doesn't have an official presence at the International CES in Las Vegas this week. It stopped participating in the opening keynote and abandoned its booths on the show floor two years ago.

But it still conducts behind-the-scenes meetings with partners, hardware manufacturers, mobile operators and developers at the giant consumer electronics show. And it left the biggest footprint among an onslaught of systems from of Lenovo, HP and others.

Among the Microsoft show news: leaks about the Nvidia-powered Surface 3 and Mini tablets — which topped rumors on gadgets like Samsung's Galaxy S5 smartphone.

Who's targeting what and where in B2B marketing? And what works? Depends on who you ask. LinkedIn is hot for B2B. No, actually Twitter's gaining steam. Banners ads are not dead. Yes they are.

Demandbase, a B2B marketing software provider, spent last year analyzing how verticals are targeting prospects. It tracked 2013 campaign strategies and spend from its customer base of B2B marketers spanning over 20 vertical industries.

Any surprises? "Software technology has always been a high-activity vertical when it comes to business marketing and advertising," Demandbase CEO Chris Golec told CMSWire, "so it was interesting to see a change in this pace with other industry players, such as financial services and manufacturing, stepping up their game in online advertising."

Despite iOS and Android's huge consumer mobile sales and the rise of bring your own device (BYOD) policies, Microsoft still has a shot at becoming the dominant force in mobile enterprise.

Business connectivity, SharePoint and Office integration for Windows Phone 8 will earn it many friends in the enterprise. And Microsoft will place increasing emphasis on its mobile offering as the desktop market continues to stagnate. As sales rise, developers are returning to populate the app marketplace.

Stay Informed

About Us

CMSWire is a popular web magazine published by Simpler Media Group.
We focus on intelligent information management, digital customer experience management, and the emergence of social business tools and practices. Read more about us
or learn how to
advertise here.

The Future of SEO is Not SEOview commentsSearch engine optimization, as all traditional definitions describe it, is going to become obsolete. And the change has already begun.The Internet has always been a landgrab. It started with domain...